Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet
Kentucky Arts Council

Elizabethtown High School Senior is Poetry Out Loud State Champion

FRANKFORT, Ky. (March 13, 2018) — Elizabethtown High School senior Kiara Jones, 16, emerged as the
leader of the pack among 16 competitors to win the Poetry Out Loud state championship March 13 at Frankfort’s Grand Theatre.

Sixteen Kentucky high school students represented their respective schools at the poetry recitation contest, which is
sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Each student is
judged on the recitation, from memory, of two poems, one poem each in the first and second round. Poems are selected
by the student and their teachers from a selected list of works. Five students were selected to advance to the third
and final round, where they recited another prepared poem.

“I feel really excited, and grateful and also a little nervous at the responsibility of having to represent the state
at nationals,” Jones said.
Jones’ path to the championship included recitations of “Passing” by Toi Derricotte and “Life in Love” by Robert Browning
in the first and second rounds, respectively. She clinched the state title with her interpretation of “The Negro Speaks
of Rivers” by Langston Hughes.

“I picked (‘Passing’) because I feel like it really applied to me. I knew what the author was talking about when she
was writing the poem and it was really easy for me to interpret it,” Jones said of her poetry selections. “(‘Life in a
Love’) was really complex, just because the wording that was used isn’t normal for our everyday language. So it was
fun to analyze that and figure out what he was trying to say. The third poem (‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’) I thought
had a nice flow to it and was easy to interpret.”

Jones will represent Kentucky at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals, April 23-25 at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C.

Other finalists were runner-up MacKenzie Ray from Grant County High School, Brianna Bradford from Betsy Layne High
School, Suzanne M. Daniels from Allen County-Scottsville High School and Emma Mitmesser from George Rogers Clark High School.

In addition to an all-expense-paid trip for herself and a chaperone to the national finals, Jones will receive $200, and
her school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books. As runner-up, Ray will receive $100, and her
school will receive a $200 stipend.

Along with Jones, Ray, Bradford, Daniels and Mitmesser, other school champions included:

Angelica Murphy, Augusta Independent School, Bracken

Blanca Aleman, Bowling Green High School, Warren

Trent Joseph Litteral, Boyd County High School, Boyd

Leann Goodman, Central Hardin High School, Hardin

Cameron Drew, Conner High School, Boone

Emilia Marks, Hart County High School, Hart

James Ray Hall, Jenkins Middle High School, Letcher

Morgan Price, Marshall County High School, Marshall

Jillian Smith, McCracken County High School, McCracken

Cody Baynori, Newport High School, Campbell

Luke Wheatley, Saint Xavier High School, Jefferson

Elizabethtown High School senior Kiara Jones won the Kentucky Poetry Out
Loud state championship March 13 with her recitation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes in the
final round. Jones will represent Kentucky at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals, April 23-25 at George
Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Photo credits: Marvin Young/Kentucky Arts Council photo

Kiara Jones, 2018 Kentucky Poetry Out Loud state champion.

Photo credits: Marvin Young/Kentucky Arts Council photo

- ### -

The
Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, fosters environments for Kentuckians to value,
participate in and benefit from the arts. Kentucky Arts Council funding is provided by the
Kentucky General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts.